


Absolution

by simplesetgo



Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: Agiels, Alternate Canon, Anal Play, Dark Past, Dark fic, Double Penetration, F/F, Porn With Plot, Punishment, Regret, Rough Sex, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:01:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplesetgo/pseuds/simplesetgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a Mord-Sith, Cara knew that everyone had dark parts of their lives that they kept from even those they loved. But nothing could prepare her for what lay hidden in Kahlan's past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Absolution

**Author's Note:**

> Set early in Season 2. As per the tags, this is dark!fic (though with a light at the end of the tunnel). Everything that takes place here is consensual; there is graphic discussion of murder and non-con. Also there is porn. Lastly, I feel like I should mention that I wrote this over a year ago and was only recently persuaded into posting it.

“I don’t understand,” Cara said once she regained her voice, staring at her blankly from the edge of the bed. “Why?”  
   
Kahlan, who was holding her gaze in the mirror while brushing her hair, nearly dried, turned around on the stool to face her directly. “To explain myself, I would have to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else.”  
   
Cara gave this thought while cinching her pack closed. Night had just fallen and the faint sound of the crowded tavern directly below them was leaking through the floorboards, and as she stood to toss her pack against the wall, she realized she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what was behind a request like this. She couldn’t understand Kahlan being willing to tell her something she wasn’t willing to tell Richard. Still, the Mother Confessor was a person of interest. Cara found her to be strangely worthy of respect in the several weeks they had traveled together, and on more than one occasion, she found herself thinking that Kahlan would be more at home in a Mord-Sith temple than she likely knew. Such thoughts were completely validated mere moments ago.  
   
“A secret, then. Are you offering?” Cara asked, feigning disinterest.  
   
“Can I trust you not to share what I’m about to tell you with Richard? Or Zedd? Or anyone. Be it out of amusement or spite.”  
   
Cara’s lips curled in a sneer at the implication she would do such a thing. “I am Mord-Sith,” she snapped. “Not a gossiping housewife. Unless this so-terrible secret places the Lord Rahl in danger, you have no concern.”  
   
Kahlan accepted the rebuke in stride and rose to cross their small lamp-lit room, pulling the curtains closed on the wide window and sliding the bolt in place to lock the door. Cara raised her brow; whatever this was, it was no jest to the Confessor.  
   
She remained standing as Kahlan arrived in front of her, and waited while she collected herself. Kahlan sighed and stared at the floor, and just when Cara was about to comment on her fascination with it, she crossed her arms under her breasts and looked Cara straight in the eye. “A Confessor’s power is dangerous,” she began vaguely.  
   
Cara frowned. “That’s hardly a secret. You destroy someone’s soul with a touch.”  
   
“And I was not always so careful with mine,” Kahlan continued, as if uninterrupted. “My mother died when I was young, and my father, once freed from confession to her, forced my sister and I to confess people who had things that he wanted.”  
   
A tinge of unease flashed through Cara at the mention of Kahlan’s sister, but she decided to let things play out. As it was, this still wasn’t sounding like something worthy of personal torment to her. “So you didn’t have a choice,” she observed.  
   
Kahlan ignored her again. “It went on for years. Six years of helping my father take and steal whoever and whatever he wanted. When we finally escaped, finding haven with the Sisters of Light, I was eleven years old.” She blinked, and her brow furrowed. “I cried when I told this to Richard,” she said, as if to herself.  
   
Cara narrowed her eyes. “So I’m not supposed to tell Richard something he already knows?”  
   
Kahlan shook her head and drew herself in a little tighter. “I stopped the story there. As far as he knows, as far as everyone knows, I grew up with the Sisters and took up my training in Aydindril when I was of age.”  
   
Cara’s interest was piqued at a referenced omission, and she leaned back against the bedside table behind her. “Go on,” she commanded.  
   
“I left,” Kahlan said softly. “When I was eighteen, I left the Sisters of Light, and I left Dennee. I was supposed to be leaving for Aydindril, but the night before I stole supplies and just…started walking. I had been so angry for so long, in secret. Everyone wanted me to commit my life to helping others. The Sisters of Light had talked of nothing else, how it was my destiny. I made fools of them, Cara, during the years I spent among them. They thought I accepted and cherished their teachings, that I wanted nothing more than to be the Confessor they expected me to be. All I could think was that nobody helped my sister, nobody helped me until it was too late, until we were broken and damaged inside, so why would I help them? Why would I help anyone at all?”  
   
Her voice was calm, but she had looked away, her eyes fixed on a spot somewhere on the wall behind Cara. “I didn’t walk for very long,” she continued. “The next morning I confessed a man for his horse. I told him to stay and wait for me in the road, but I didn’t go back.”  
   
Cara was enthralled, even if she refused to show it. “What happened?”  
   
“He likely died on that same road,” Kahlan replied. “And I knew he might, but I left him anyway. The confessed will kill, or be killed, before they’ll disobey their mistress. If anyone tried to help him, or drag him away, he wouldn’t let them. If anyone gave him coins, mistaking him for a beggar, he wouldn’t have anything to do with them. He would have simply…waited for me.”  
   
She paused and suddenly looked like she might stop, might flee for the door, but then she put her head down and continued, as if she were reading words written on Cara’s belly. “I confessed a woman for her dress the same day, and later that night I confessed an innkeeper for a free meal and room. Simply because I could. The first day of my newfound freedom I destroyed the lives of three people whose greatest crime was coming within my sight. I started living like my father had. I was well aware of it, but I didn’t care. I thought he had the right idea after all. I wandered the Midlands over their length and breadth, taking what I wanted, whatever I desired, whatever could fit in the saddlebags.”  
   
Cara crossed her own arms and stared at her, relaxing further against the table. This was far and away different, and worse, than she had expected. “You didn’t stop somewhere?”  
   
“No. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, and I hated my confessed. I hated the empty look in their eyes. I hated how they fawned over me, so I kept moving. Usually I would order them to return to their lives as if nothing had happened, but sometimes I used them to relieve my frustrations.”  
   
The hair stood up on the back of Cara’s neck, and she suddenly understood just why Kahlan had closed the room so tightly. “Frustrations?” she repeated. “What kind?”  
   
“I hated my confessed,” Kahlan said, echoing herself, “and I hated my power. I hated myself in turn, and I sometimes took men and women to their own beds, and I let them love me since I could not. They disgusted me once I was done with them, so I usually told them they had displeased me, and they would end up taking their own lives.”  
   
Cara barely hid something that felt disturbingly close to shock—not at the act, but that Kahlan was laying claim to it. “How long?” she breathed. “How many?”  
   
“A year,” Kahlan said distantly. “It seemed like so much less. I never tried to count how many I confessed…hundreds, likely. I left most of them alive. But some aren’t.”  
   
“How have you not run across any?” Cara asked, fascinated and suddenly full of questions. “In your travels with Richard and Zedd?”  
   
“We have,” Kahlan admitted. “It’s explained easily enough. I simply tell him they were criminals. That the confession was carried out as a sentence. It’s not as if my confessed will disagree with me—their mistress.”  
   
“And none of the men you fucked gave you a child?” Cara asked bluntly. She almost didn’t expect an answer, and she definitely expected a rebuke of some kind. But Kahlan simply shook her head, and her expression, schooled into neutrality as it was, didn’t change.  
   
“If I let them finish at all, I made them waste their seed.” She ducked her head suddenly, the first blatant display of emotion since she began her confession. “Richard thinks me pure. A virgin,” she said softly. “I don’t know what I’ll do if we’re ever able to be together; I hate lying to him.”  
   
Cara was about to offer a list of the things that could take a woman’s virginity besides a man, some surprisingly chaste, but decided that could wait. Instead she asked the question that had been burning in her since she first grasped the extent and seriousness of Kahlan’s lost year; Cara hadn’t known the Confessor very long, but that didn’t stop her from struggling to understand the person she was claiming to have been. “Why did you stop? What changed you from that into…this?” She gestured helpfully at the woman before her, standing tall in her white Confessor dress.  
   
“When I decided to stop and become a proper Confessor after all, the Mother Confessor took me in at Aydindril. They were expecting me a year ago; nobody knew where I’d been, and I lied to them. I said I was held captive. Everyone was so kind to me, and I came close to ending my own life in secret, several times, but I decided to change instead. To try and make up for what I’d done. I trained and studied with other Confessors, and sometimes I wondered if they knew something was wrong with me. But I became very, very good at keeping this secret, even though visiting justice on others, using my power, depressed me for days.  
   
“And it wasn’t until I met Richard that I changed again…that I became who I am now. I don’t deserve him, but I love him. Cara, it’s not an act,” she insisted, as if accused. “He showed me that I could be the woman that I wanted to be, Confessor or not, no matter my past. He’s taught me more than he’ll ever know.”  
   
Cara shook her head. Such sentimentality didn’t distract her; she knew her initial question hadn’t been answered. “You didn’t just ‘decide to stop’ one day,” she challenged. “I’m asking what caused that.”  
   
Caught in another omission, Kahlan looked away. “I need to keep some secrets,” she said tersely. “What made me truly realize what I had become…I don’t intend on ever putting words to it. And even if I had lived a perfect life up to that point, I would still be standing here before you, asking for the same thing as a result of it.”  
   
“Asking for pain,” Cara said flatly. She couldn’t imagine Kahlan doing anything worse than what she’d already described, but she wasn’t going to press the issue.  
   
“Absolution,” Kahlan corrected, somewhat hotly. “I’ve tried to seek it ever since. Nothing’s enough; I will never help enough people, or do enough good. I need someone who knows what I’ve done to…”  
   
“Punish you?”  
   
Kahlan bit her lip in frustration and hesitation. “For lack of a better word,” she sighed. “I suppose that would be the method, but not the result. No punishment exists that’s strong enough for what I’ve done, but I need something anyway. I have to try, even if it’s just…symbolic. Cara, it’s been so long, and I still can’t come to terms with what I was. I can’t escape that part of me. Something tells me it’s because I got away with it.” She smiled sadly, mirthlessly. “There were many, many Confessors when I was young. Rumors passed about a rogue Confessor, but everyone who believed them always assumed it was someone else who had…gone bad. I seemed too kindhearted, despite the suspicious timing of my departure and return to those who knew me.”  
   
Cara nodded, giving serious thought to what she was being asked to do. “Kahlan…you want me to break you?”  
   
“I need you to break my body,” Kahlan confirmed. “Tonight. But I need my mind intact. I need to stay conscious and myself, or it’s all for nothing.”  
   
“It would take me far longer than one night to break your mind, Kahlan,” she responded, almost not realizing she had just paid the Confessor something resembling a compliment.  
   
“All the same,” Kahlan replied. Her eyes, always so clear in their color but suddenly seeming more so, focused on her own in challenge. “Will you help me?”  
   
Cara suddenly understood why she had seemed hesitant to call this mere punishment for crimes past. This was a crisis of identity for Kahlan; who she was then was at odds with who she was now. She wanted to beat and kill her own past, and Cara was filled with a sudden appreciation for the way Kahlan’s mind worked. Mord-Sith excelled at nothing if not exactly that. She gave a firm but curt nod in answer.  
   
Kahlan looked utterly relieved, and it was as if the weight was lifted from her shoulders already. “Thank you,” she sighed. She took a seat on the edge of the bed, and Cara pushed off of the table to stand before her, hands clasped behind her back.  
   
“I won’t insult you by asking if you’re sure, but I do need to know if anything is…disallowed.”  
   
Kahlan shook her head as she looked up at her. “No. I don’t care what you do to me as long as it hurts.”  
   
Cara’s next exhale was shakier than she would’ve liked. She hadn’t had someone up in chains since she joined Richard, and it was exhilarating to hear such words. She set her face to hide her eagerness, and Kahlan took it as something else. Hesitation, maybe. “Cara, any pleasure you take from this, from me, can be your repayment,” she said softly. “I don’t have anything else to offer you.”  
   
“You would whore yourself out to me?”  
   
She regretted the words immediately after they left her, and suddenly all Cara could think of was the Kahlan she was used to, the Kahlan she knew, laughing by the campfire at Zedd’s jokes and smiling shyly at Richard. That Kahlan, the one who had earned her respect, was not a whore. Her jaw tightened and she looked away, completely sure she’d just ruined everything. The hidden side of Kahlan, the old and wrong side, was interesting, fascinating, and Cara figured she would probably get along better with her than the current Kahlan. She would definitely be more fun. But it wouldn’t be…right, and she found herself clearing her throat and saying something strange. “I didn’t mean to—”  
   
“It’s alright,” Kahlan interrupted, not a hint of a blush. “Can we…start?”  
   
Cara nodded and stepped back. “Undress,” she said, her tone clipped. Kahlan quickly stood, her hands raising to her chest, and after a slight pause, she looked down and began loosening the laces there. Since she’d just bathed, she hadn’t bothered with a corset. She was nude underneath her Confessor whites. Cara began to pace as she watched, fingertips brushing against holstered Agiels. The small bursts of pain reassured that this was real, that the Mother Confessor was shamelessly stripping to her skin before her.  
   
As she did exactly that, letting her white dress fall to her waist to expose perfectly formed breasts previously so frustratingly hidden, Cara found herself gripping an Agiel at her side. Kahlan must have heard its soft whine, for she looked straight to Cara’s waist, the belt where they hung, and she paused before continuing. She pushed the dress down from her hips, canting them to one side and back. When it fell pooled to her feet, revealing a small triangle of dark hair above her sex, Cara pulled free both of her Agiels and crossed them behind the small of her back, hooking her fingers together in a relaxed but ready stance. The sharp pain coursing up her arms quickly settled into the same familiar and forgettable buzz that made them feel like a part of her, an extension of her own body.  
   
The Mother Confessor stepped to the side and knelt to carefully gather up her dress before folding it in her arms reverently. She turned away from Cara to set it on the bedside table, and Cara let her eyes sweep wantonly across Kahlan’s body. She was…perfect. Pale, ivory skin, unblemished by scars or marks, only gave way to freckles on her shoulders. The dark hair spilling freely down her back in waves and loose curls, now dried from her earlier bath, was in sharp contrast to the rest of her. It was striking. Cara wanted to take off her gloves; she was curious if Kahlan’s hair was as soft as it looked, if her skin was as supple as it seemed, but she gripped the Agiels tighter instead as her blood began to thunder in her veins.  
   
Her gaze ventured lower, to the well-formed thighs and calves of her long legs, to the shapely cheeks of her ass and the curve of her hips. Cara knew Kahlan could more than hold her own in battle, and she had somehow imagined she would look tougher. As it was she was a paradox of softness and strength. She suddenly noticed that the Mother Confessor had stilled, head bowed with her hands on the table, as if she was waiting for something. As if she knew Cara was looking at her, as if her body was being appraised for use. “I used to ask them if I was beautiful,” Kahlan whispered, as if to no one. “And they always promised me that I was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.”  
   
Cara swallowed. She was speaking of her confessed; did Kahlan want her to disagree? What would happen if she said the wrong thing? When she didn’t say anything at all and just stood, frozen, Kahlan turned to face her and asked, “Are you frightened of me?”  
   
Mord-Sith were capable of lying to Confessors. Or so Cara hoped. “Mord-Sith are not frightened of those who submit to them,” she answered neutrally.  
   
Something changed in Kahlan’s eyes, and she moved quickly. Cara was fast, but before she could raise her Agiels a strong hand was firmly gripping her throat. She had never seen a Confessor flex her power before, bring it to the surface and then submerge it, but Kahlan’s eyes flooded with black for the smallest moment before clearing, and Cara was still very much herself. Yet Kahlan’s gaze stayed hard, and her lips pulled back in a snarl. “I am not your pet,” she said harshly, her hand tightening around Cara’s neck. “You are not my mistress. Do you understand?”  
   
Such was Cara’s first encounter with what Kahlan so wanted to kill. What she had kept hidden, from everyone, until now. This was not Con Dar, a magical fury borne of a desire for vengeance. This was not the threat of justice. Kahlan’s fingers were around her throat due to something more twisted and dark, wild without purpose, and she saw it in Kahlan’s eyes, in the way she had bared her teeth. Cara held her gaze, unafraid of that which she knew, as she slowly and deliberately raised an Agiel to the soft skin on the inside of Kahlan’s arm. The Agiel screamed, Kahlan’s jaw clenched at the pain, and she slowly withdrew her hand. Cara swallowed forcefully before trying to speak. “If you submit to me, as you say you will, there is no difference. Mistress and pet, master and slave, Mord-Sith and Confessor…they will all be same when you cry out from my Agiels.”  
   
Kahlan raised her chin. “Then make me cry out.”  
   
Cara shoved forcefully into Kahlan’s stomach with both Agiels, without warning, making the Confessor stumble back against the table and double over, clutching blindly at Cara at the shock of such sudden pain. Her Agiels were hungry, and they screamed as she fed them the naked and soft flesh of Kahlan’s belly. Yet the Confessor didn’t cry out, and she slowly straightened herself and let go of Cara, taking deep and defiant breaths even as Cara pressed harder.  
   
When she withdrew them and stepped back, watching the two black webs fade away from her skin, Kahlan shook her head. “I caused far more pain than that to many more people. Make me cry out.”  
   
Cara raised her brow. “You should’ve screamed from that. You should be retching. You haven’t been trained; explain yourself.”  
   
Kahlan looked away, her bravado suddenly gone. “I stole an Agiel,” she admitted. “From that Mord-Sith we killed. It’s in the bottom of my pack. I’ve been trying to hold it at night during my watch, but I can’t make myself do anything more with it.”  
   
Cara stared at her. “So you’re asking for pain, but you built yourself up to handle it? Why?”  
   
“I wasn’t sure I would need to go this far. I thought maybe if I hurt myself for a couple hours every night, it might be enough.”  
   
Yet more evidence that Kahlan was exceptionally skilled at keeping secrets. Cara felt she should stop being surprised by anything Kahlan said or did, at least for tonight. “I see. Kahlan…if you want me to do this, you need to let me. In whatever way I see fit.”  
   
When Kahlan nodded and lowered her eyes submissively, Cara stepped back to survey their room. This was an inn, not a Mord-Sith temple; there were hardly chains hanging from the ceiling. They had no rope either, nothing to bind her hands with at all. She would be very much dependent on Kahlan’s continued willful cooperation, and she had her doubts about how long the Confessor would provide it.  
   
The bed was small, barely able to sleep two people, but the four wooden posts at the corners were solid and rose chest high. Cara motioned to her and gestured at the bedposts on the end. Kahlan quickly understood, stepping to the foot of the bed, but then she paused. “Face forward,” Cara clarified. The Confessor obeyed, turning away and spreading her arms wide to grip the posts. Cara stepped behind her and swept her hair to the side, placing it over her front.  
   
The smooth and pale skin of her back, now exposed to Cara in full, was…achingly flawless.  
   
Kahlan rolled her shoulders, as if in invitation, as she widened her stance before tightening her arms in their reach to the posts. If this were the beginning of a normal and routine breaking, the kind Cara had performed so many times, she would toy and play with Kahlan. She would make the brunette flinch; she would make her skin crawl with the anticipation and dread of each blow. But Kahlan had made it very clear that this would be different. Cara had only one night, not weeks, and Kahlan wanted damage to her body, not her nerves.  
   
She knew she would be holding herself back. Richard and Zedd would return soon, and she needed to be careful not to inflict lasting visible damage or injury that would require the healing of a wizard. And it would be hard to separate the punishment, the administration of pain, from its counterpart, the degrading and humiliating commands, comments and whispers. But she would try. It was a challenge, if nothing else.  
   
After one last raking glance over her body as it was, Cara’s arm went back, and she began striking Kahlan with her Agiel, methodically, putting measured force into each blow such that the pattern of dark veins bursting from the contact faded nearly instantly on her skin. Cara visited damage on her shoulderblades, on her lower back and her sides, and then she started over. Well familiar with precise application of pain, Cara made sure the strikes against muscle and bone were hard enough to bruise, but only just. Kahlan, for her part, stayed completely silent against the screaming Agiel, even as she rocked forward slightly with each blow.  
   
Cara eventually began soothing the blunt contact with a different kind of pain; she mixed forceful blows from one Agiel with long, agonizing strokes from the other. Watching an angry web of red and black veins appear and shift as an Agiel was dragged over a body had always been beautiful to Cara. To see the pain travel and spark through Kahlan’s milky skin was nothing short of mesmerizing.  
   
Kahlan, with her head bowed, finally began grunting softly each time Cara hit her, and a glance confirmed her jaw was tightly clenched and her eyes squeezed shut. Cara paused and pursed her lips. It was, strangely enough, up to her to make sure Kahlan kept her own promise to herself. She wouldn’t allow Kahlan to retreat into her mind. Her Agiels painted pain all the way down the sides of Kahlan’s back, from her shoulders to her hips, and then she stepped in closer, encircling her middle and setting the length of both Agiels against her belly. The sheer amount of contact had Kahlan twitching against her as the Agiels screamed, and she was mildly impressed that the Confessor didn’t pull her hands from the bedposts.  
   
When Cara removed them the sudden relative silence revealed Kahlan’s panting; she’d likely been holding her breath. “Kahlan,” she said quietly, firmly, into her ear. “Make sure you’re thinking of the right things. Tell me about the people you’ve confessed while I work.”  
   
Kahlan took in a deep breath, doubtless grateful for the short reprieve. “Alright,” she whispered.  
   
She further abused Kahlan’s back while the Confessor spoke, haltingly and neutrally, of the people she’d wrongfully stolen from the world. Her memory of such things was apparently quite good, for she answered every detailed question Cara had. Names were something Kahlan never knew; she spoke of them by gender and appearance, what she took from them if anything. The skin of Kahlan’s back was showing clear signs of torture in the form of angry redness and the precursors of bruises. Cara began broadening her attentions; her Agiels rolled and slid across Kahlan’s extended arms, and muscles bunched under the touch, her knuckles whitening in their tight grip on the bedposts. She wanted to rain down blows on her forearms, on her wrists, simply to see if she could break Kahlan’s hold, but tightened her jaw and resisted. Such damage would be decidedly visible and hard to explain.  
   
There was a soft cry, of surprise if nothing else, when Cara delivered a sudden and exceptionally hard blow to her ass instead. Another, and then four more alternating between her cheeks, and Kahlan jerked forward each time, causing a raise in Cara’s brow. She filed the reaction away for later use and holstered one Agiel. “Come,” she said curtly, grabbing a fistful of Kahlan’s hair with her free hand, near the base of her skull. Kahlan hissed but complied, finally relinquishing her death grip on the posts to let Cara guide her to the near wall. She pushed Kahlan none-too-gently against the wooden planking, beside the bedside table, and actually winced when she misjudged her force and Kahlan’s forehead hit the wall with a sharp crack.  
   
“Put your back to the wall,” Cara ordered, hopefully hiding her concern. “Face me.” She retrieved a small wooden chair and set it next to Kahlan, moving her such that she was between the bedside table and the chair’s back. “You need something to hold on to,” she explained, pausing to examine the small wound above Kahlan’s brow. It was the first time she’d seen Kahlan’s face since they’d began. The wound would swell and bruise, but at least it wasn’t bleeding badly. Tears, on the other hand, had been falling freely to stain Kahlan’s cheeks, and her eyes were still wet. Not that such was unexpected.  
   
Kahlan gingerly pressed her back to the wall, shifting experimentally to find a good hold on the furniture on either side of her. “Alright,” she said softly. “I’m ready.”  
   
Cara frowned suddenly as she redrew her other Agiel. “Why did you cry?”  
   
“Because you were hurting me.”  
   
“It was the pain, then?”  
   
Kahlan’s brow furrowed. “Yes. Why else?”  
   
“Are you sure?”  
   
“Cara? I don’t understand.”  
   
Cara had difficulty putting words to her problem—that Kahlan should be weeping from guilt as she confessed her crimes, because that’s what the Kahlan she knew and respected would be doing. Instead, she flipped the Agiels in her palms and drove them forcefully into Kahlan’s shoulders as she drove a knee into her stomach. The air rushed from Kahlan’s lungs and a cry choked in her throat. Cara knew her back was tender, and being slammed against the hard wall had set every nerve in her skin and muscle on fire. That was in addition to the inherent pain of two Agiels and a knee in the belly.  
   
She stepped back, leaving Kahlan to fruitlessly attempt pulling air into her lungs as fresh tears streamed from her eyes. When she finally succeeded and her naked breasts heaved with deep breaths, Cara canted her head. “You should cry for the right reasons,” she offered vaguely. It was all she could come up with.  
   
Kahlan nodded, as if she understood, and Cara suspected she’d just been lied to. Her Agiel flashed and struck the brunette across the cheek before she could stop herself, making Kahlan’s head snap to the side, and her suspicions were confirmed. “What did you mean?” the Confessor asked meekly. “I can’t…not cry. When you hurt me badly.”  
   
“We’re not here to discuss your tolerance of pain,” Cara replied. She felt her point made, and so they began again. She visited pain on Kahlan’s front much like she had her back, but she was conscious of leaving too many marks that would be visible when Kahlan wore her white dress. Kahlan continued her confessions, without being asked, in between soft grunts and groans of pain. The sounds were intimate, and incredibly pleasing to Cara. Not that she revealed such. Kahlan kept her stomach tight as Cara rained down blows there, and on her ribs. When Cara’s arms grew tired and she took to drawing long lines on her breasts, on her belly, the Confessor’s words came with increasing difficulty.

Cara finally stepped back to admire her work, and she noticed they had both worked up a light sheen of sweat—Kahlan from her constant tensing, stiffening, and occasional spasm, and Cara from her repetitive and forceful strikes to the Confessor’s body. It was time to move on, to inflict far more pain with less work. This is where she was sure she would lose Kahlan’s submission, but she wasn’t going to stop now.

She sheathed both Agiels and stood before Kahlan while the brunette stared back at her, shifting uneasily. “There are places,” Cara began. “Soft places, on your body, where the pain of an Agiel is multiplied. Behind the knee, under the arm…and worse. All far worse than when I laid the Agiels flat on your skin.”

“Are you asking my permission? I told you I didn’t care.”

“I know, as long as it hurts. I’m doing you a favor, Kahlan, since this is hardly a normal breaking. I’m simply ensuring that you know just how badly I can hurt you. Pain and pleasure are very much similar, and the magic of the Agiel is strongest when the two are together.”

“Soft…places,” Kahlan repeated quietly, holding her gaze.

Something told Cara she had just figured things out for herself, but she still stepped forward to Kahlan and meaningfully, purposefully, cupped her sex with a gloved hand. Kahlan didn’t even stiffen or tense. “If I hurt you here,” Cara began slowly, her voice soft in Kahlan’s ear, “the pain will be unlike anything you have felt, anything you can imagine. It will be worse than everything I’ve done so far, combined, and delivered in the space of a heartbeat. And it will continue, as such.”

Cara’s hand moved, almost of its own volition, to deliver three rough and quick strokes between her legs. Warmth was seeping through her gloves from Kahlan’s body. Kahlan gasped intimately, ever so slightly, and suddenly, in spite of what the Mother Confessor had wanted or planned, she seemed to be nothing more than an eager pet listening to the words of her mistress. “I am promising you incredible pain,” Cara continued, letting her voice drop further, “but the cost is equal pleasure. You will like it, Kahlan, I’m afraid. But if you reach release, with the Agiel inside you, the pain and the pleasure will build on each other, and you will experience far more of both than you could ever feel from either on their own. That may be what you’re looking for.” Her hand left Kahlan’s legs and she stepped away, canting her head. “You’ll be enduring pleasure to receive pain. It’s interesting—even for Mord-Sith, the opposite is true. We suffer the pain for the pleasure.”

Kahlan was staring at her blankly, but Cara knew her thoughts were racing. “There’s nothing else?” she asked at length, numbly. “That can give me that kind of pain? I’m not looking for pleasure, Cara.”

Cara shook her head. “Not breaking or crushing a bone, not slicing off a finger, or limb. This is worse. If you want absolution, if you want to sear your mind with such pain as to make your existence nothing else, this is the only way.” There was, of course, a step beyond it, but just like this step, she wouldn’t admit its existence unless it was needed.

Kahlan gave her a nervous smile. “Then I suppose we should try.”

She wasn’t supposed to be smiling at this. It disappointed Cara. She backhanded Kahlan cruelly, the sound sharp in the small room, and Kahlan lowered her eyes as she worked her jaw. It gave Cara an idea. “First,” she said thoughtfully, drawing a single Agiel, “more relevant punishment. You said you let your confessed die. You said that you let them end their own lives by suggestion. Did you ever actually order them to?”

The Confessor swallowed thickly. “Yes,” she admitted. “Near the end. I was the worst near the end. But not many.”

“How many?”

“Five,” Kahlan whispered.

“How many of these five did you fuck before you killed them?”

“All of them.”

Cara pressed the Agiel under Kahlan’s breast and started trailing a path downward, slowly and deliberately, as its whine filled the room once again. “You said first,” Kahlan gasped once it reached her belly, clearly concerned. “Something else first.”

Cara watched her carefully, but she kept her shaking grip on the table and chair at her sides, and her back to the wall. Her restraint was admirable. Without pause, she slipped the Agiel between Kahlan’s legs, laying it flat against her sex as it screamed, and Kahlan groaned and trembled, the chair scraping against the floor as she shook. After a twist, Cara sharply pulled the Agiel upward between her thighs, ensuring contact with her folds and her clit, and Kahlan snapped her head back against the wall as she hissed breath between her teeth, rising to her toes and arching herself upward away from the Agiel’s touch. Such reaction was almost certainly involuntary; that didn’t mean it was beyond punishment. The Agiel left Kahlan’s legs and slammed into her ribs, staying there until the Confessor forced out an apology through clenched teeth. No pet or trainee of Cara’s had ever been so…smart. They usually needed to be told when to apologize; why they were being hurt. But Kahlan, as she had made clear, was hardly a pet.

“Tell me about the first one,” Cara said calmly.

“I confessed him…in a stable,” Kahlan said slowly as she recovered her breath, staring off into nowhere as she was transported into her past. “And then he took me against the wall. He finished on my leg, and I made him clean it off of me with his shirt. I let him follow me out of the village. There was a bridge over a river. It was cold, winter, and I told him it would please me if he threw himself off and didn’t try to swim. I told him that if he loved me enough, he wouldn’t die. His body was carried downriver; by then I was trying to be more careful about…what I left behind.” Kahlan’s eyes slid back to her own, and Cara just stared at her in awe, nearly forgetting what she had planned to do. When it came back to her, and she raised her free hand to force Kahlan’s mouth open, she was surprised to find that Kahlan let her, despite the Agiel rising to her face. “The words left your tongue,” Cara said. “It needs to be punished.”

A sudden thought made her press her own tongue against her teeth. She quite clearly remembered Kahlan saying she was allowed to enjoy this, and she quickly made her decision, adding, “I won’t remove it until you close your lips around it. They are equally guilty.”

It was a weak excuse, but Kahlan seemed to buy it. The Confessor simply held her gaze and loosened her jaw, and Cara set her own and shoved the Agiel into Kahlan’s open mouth. If Kahlan tried to scream she couldn’t hear it over that of the Agiel; she only saw her throat bob and fresh tears stream from her eyes squeezed shut. Cara pushed her forearm against the top of Kahlan’s chest, and she held it in firmly, not enough to choke or gag her, but angling it down to make sure Kahlan’s tongue couldn’t escape the contact. Her mouth was still wide, her lips pulled back, and Cara leaned in, next to Kahlan’s ear, and made sure her voice was loud, strong, and commanding. “Suck.”

The short pretense was over, but it didn’t matter once Cara received her first payment of the night. It was the sight of Kahlan forcing her own mouth shut, tears falling as her lips closed around the Agiel in a tight circle. It was obscene and Cara knew it was excruciatingly painful, and both of those things contributed to the sudden warmth in her loins—and when Cara felt Kahlan’s tongue pushing at it inside her mouth, it sent nothing short of a jolt straight to her own center.

After Cara finally slid the Agiel free, slowly, Kahlan coughed and hacked, but didn’t say a word. She just spit to her side and swallowed repeatedly, rolling her tongue over her lips.

“And the next?” Cara asked, returning the Agiel to poise between her legs.

Kahlan didn’t respond at first, looking anywhere but at her, and just before Cara decided real punishment was in order for such a slight, she spoke. “A woman. She was…beautiful.”

“Go on,” Cara ordered.

Kahlan licked her lips, slowly. “I liked rubbing my sex on the faces of beautiful women,” she continued softly. “I would tell them to lay down, and I would mount them, their mouths and their tongues, and I would writhe on them for my release. They would thank me for it. This woman’s face was still wet with my come, from her brow to her chin, when I told her to drive a knife into her heart. I told her that she loved me too much, that she needed to bleed some out of her. I heard her body collapse when I was leaving her home. She lived alone,” Kahlan added, “so I wasn’t concerned about…”

She trailed off, and Cara once again had to mentally shake off distraction borne of disbelief that Kahlan had done these things. Knowing they had happened so many years ago didn’t make them any easier to acknowledge. They worked slowly, painfully, through the worst of Kahlan’s murders by passing the Agiel between her mouth and her sex, and by the time they were done, her words and voice were thick. Cara knew it was only because her tongue was numb. Her Agiel was also slick with something besides spit from Kahlan’s mouth, progressively more so each time she visited her increasingly giving legs. She hadn’t entered Kahlan, instead pressing and rolling the Agiel against her. The Confessor had started bearing down against the Agiel in turn instead of pulling away, and she’d started to suck on the length of it without being forced.

Cara swept two gloved fingers of her free hand against the folds of Kahlan’s sex. She raised them to her nose, inhaling the thick scent of her, and then wiped them dismissively in Kahlan’s hair. The brunette was incredibly aroused; reliving sexual memories, receiving the touch of the Agiel, and tasting her own sex had all done their work. It was good, and according to plan. Wetness made pain more exact, more exquisite, for an Agiel. “It’s time,” Cara said. “Lay down.”

Kahlan nodded, her face flushed, and made to step away from the wall. Without warning, as a reminder, Cara pulled her forward and shoved her down, and the Confessor stumbled roughly onto the floor, falling onto her front. Her hair spilled to the side to reveal her back; truthfully there was more bruised skin than not, and Cara took a small moment to appraise and approve of her work.

The Confessor had pushed up onto her forearms but didn’t raise herself up further, and she looked over her shoulder to Cara with a question in her hooded blue eyes. They said, to Cara, _is this how you want me?_

“Don’t get up,” Cara said, once she’d given up hope of hearing the words. “Turn over, stretch out on your back, but move so you can hold the bedpost with your arms over your head. You need something to hold on to.”

Kahlan obeyed, and Cara kneeled at her side once she was settled. The floorboards were hardly clean; she found herself absently brushing dirt from Kahlan’s belly, then her skin elsewhere. The Confessor seemed on the verge of saying something, and Cara stopped abruptly when she realized they might be words of gratitude for the simple act. But she was wrong.

“This is dangerous for you,” Kahlan said. Cara appreciated that she didn’t show concern, didn’t ask her to be careful. It was simply a reminder. She held up her Agiel, whining softly, in answer.

“I won’t be touching you. This will.”

Kahlan shivered slightly, and nodded.

Cara narrowed her eyes. She almost looked…eager. Almost. “Spread your legs,” she added.

Kahlan obediently parted her thighs wide, and Cara saw just how wet the lips of her sex were as she exposed herself. They glistened with ample arousal, and her leathers were suddenly too tight and too hot. She could tend to that later; it had become easy to force down arousal in the last several weeks.

She crouched between Kahlan’s legs, forcing them wider, and placed a hand above her center, partly to hold her down. Her thumb and fingers spread open her sex, revealing soft, pink flesh, and Cara paused with Agiel hovering outside her entrance. Her eyes flew up to Kahlan’s, which were squeezed shut, and then she firmly pushed the tip inside of her. Kahlan cried out, convulsing as the Agiel screamed and painted her milky thighs with spidery black veins, and Cara sighed and removed it.

“Why did you…” Kahlan panted. “Keep going.”

Such a direct order from a pet would normally be met with harsh punishment. Normally. “Bite down on me,” Cara said, leaning in and holding the edge of her palm meaningfully over Kahlan’s lips. Kahlan furrowed her brow but opened her mouth, and Cara placed her hand between white teeth. “I can’t feel anything,” she explained. “My hands go numb when I’ve held the Agiels for this long, so bite as hard as you need to.”

She was only doing this because her mistress had done it for her, on her first time.

Then she entered Kahlan again, this time a little deeper, watching her jaw clamp down on her gloved hand, and this time Kahlan just took short and quick breaths through her nose. Cara slid the Agiel in and out of her, slow and shallow, bringing it to her entrance and back, and Kahlan’s stomach flexed as she shuddered. Her white-knuckled grip on the bedpost was back, her arms were taut and strained over her head, and in her eyes, Cara saw that familiar mixture of pleasure and pain. Kahlan wore it well. When she shook her head from side to side suddenly, Cara removed her hand from her mouth.

“More,” Kahlan whispered.

Cara obeyed, as if she were the submitter, only because she wanted this as bad as Kahlan. She gripped Kahlan’s thigh, giving her more of the Agiel and increasing her pace, and it wasn’t long before she was fucking the Confessor almost roughly, thin dark lines taking up residence on the pale skin of her inner thighs. Kahlan grunted and moaned in equal measure as Cara took her, her breasts heaving and shaking, and Cara saw her eyes rolled back before she closed them. When her legs thrashed suddenly Cara paused, pressing down on her belly and holding the Agiel in its place inside of her. She hadn’t gone up to the bulb that marked the hilt of the Agiel, but she was close. Its scream was muffled slightly as Cara spoke clearly above it. “Kahlan, open your eyes.”

The Confessor obeyed in turn, and when she saw that Kahlan’s eyes were still blue, hazed though they were, she resumed her movements, giving her quick and hard thrusts that made her breath hitch. Cara rested her thumb on her clit and Kahlan groaned loudly as she squirmed. “Cara, inside me,” she said brokenly. “Melting. I can’t…”

She knew all too well how this felt, how impossible it was too describe, and truthfully she was in no small way impressed Kahlan had managed to form coherent words at all. She didn’t know if that was good or bad; if the Confessor would somehow need…more. Kahlan’s breathing was erratic, the skin on her face and chest impossibly flushed, and Cara knew it wouldn’t be long before she broke. This was happening quicker than she would’ve liked.

She worked them both to a fresh sweat, holding Kahlan down and fucking her like a blacksmith hammers at an anvil, and the only sounds beside the constant whine of the Agiel were the increasingly obscene noises coming from Kahlan’s throat. Cara raised herself enough to watch Kahlan’s eyes as they fixed on a point on the ceiling. When the Confessor suddenly arched her back off the floor, Cara loosed her hold on Kahlan’s thigh and drove in deep, but Kahlan collapsed back down a heartbeat later, shaking her head from side to side as she trembled.

This was a beautiful sight but a most painful detachment, keeping herself so rigid and separate, and Cara fought back a sudden want to toss aside the Agiel. She just wanted to be closer. She wanted, so badly, to feel every inch of Kahlan’s hot and sweat-slick body against her own. She wanted to bury her head between breasts and lick the flushed skin there with her tongue, to take nipples between her teeth until they were dark. She wanted to take Kahlan’s mouth with her own until the Confessor’s lips were as bruised as the rest of her. She wanted, needed, to lock her thighs with Kahlan’s strong ones and entwine them both, to feel Kahlan grind her heated and dripping sex on her own, so she could feel the groan in her chest, feel her shaking with release instead of watching it.

“It hurts,” Kahlan gasped breathlessly, breaking her distraction. “Oh Cara, it hurts. But it’s coming, Cara, don’t…slow, don’t stop, Cara…”

Cara gritted her teeth. She couldn’t fuck her hard for much longer, and she couldn’t risk touching her clit when she was this close. Her magic could explode forth from her instantly. But then she remembered—she had two Agiels. After drawing the other from her side, she pressed the length of it against Kahlan’s stomach and slowly traveled downward; she wasn’t at all sure if Kahlan would be able to sense such lesser pain, her body likely being on fire already, but if she could it would give her time to prepare.

She continued driving her closer; her thrusts into Kahlan were fast and hard and deep, and when she touched her second Agiel to Kahlan’s clit, her body tightened, her muscles standing out under skin. And then she snapped, her eyes flashing black, with a sharp and loud cry, and Cara gripped the Agiel carefully, keeping it inside her sex to ensure her continued pain and pleasure, mindful of the way Kahlan’s hips were bucking and rolling. If her thighs squeezed shut, she would have to fall back, quickly, but for now she stayed in her perilous position between the Confessor’s legs. She watched the bruised body in front of her arch and flex, her eyes staying black longer than she’d ever seen, and she waited while Kahlan rode out her orgasm, trembling, gripping the bedpost above her as if her life depended on it. Cara hadn’t had one like that in months. She found herself a little jealous.

Once Kahlan came down and her breathing regained normalcy, Cara fell to her side, still catching her own breath. Kahlan turned her head to look at her, and she said in quiet amazement, “I feel strange, Cara.”

“It’s the absence of pain,” she explained. “Your body doesn’t know what to do after experiencing so much. It’ll pass soon.” Despite her words, she couldn’t help noticing that Kahlan had seemed to be experiencing far more pleasure than pain, especially near the end. Especially in her orgasm. But for now she held her tongue.

Kahlan let go of the bedpost and forced herself up onto her arms, and she looked down, idly noticing the Agiel Cara had left inside her. Pulling it free, she raised and regarded the glistening shaft curiously. It whined softly in her hand as Kahlan brought it to her lips, timidly touching her pink tongue to its surface. Then her eyes closed, and she hungrily licked the Agiel’s full length from hilt to tip, tasting her own slickness on it. Cara’s jaw tightened as the brunette twisted it and licked it again, and then once more.

She waited for a second question, unsurprised when Kahlan turned to her again, blinking, her eyes still somewhat hazed and unfocused. “It doesn’t hurt,” she said in awe.

“That won’t last long either,” Cara told her. “Hold on a little longer and it will hurt. The pain of holding an Agiel is nothing compared to what you just felt.”

Kahlan made to place the Agiel on the floor beside her, but the sharp sound of warning that left Cara’s throat stopped her, and she handed the Agiel to her with an apologetic glance. She shifted herself to sit reclined against the side of the bed, and she ran her hand between her breasts, gathering the sweat there. When she tilted her head back and sighed deeply, Cara knew the intoxicating aftereffects of such a pain-driven orgasm were over, or nearly there. “It wasn’t enough,” Kahlan said softly. “I need more. If that was all of it, if that’s the most pain you can give me, I’m stuck with this.”

Cara sighed. “There is something else, something worse,” she replied vaguely. Holding Kahlan’s stare for a moment, she paused to appreciate the obvious tension. “Get on your knees,” she commanded. “Bend over in front of the bedpost. You need something to hold on to.”

Kahlan licked her lips. “Oh…again?”

“No. Not again. This will be different. If it doesn’t work, I truly am out of ideas. And…places on your body.”

The Confessor shuffled into position on all fours before clutching at the bedpost, and as Cara lowered herself to both knees behind her, Kahlan quietly said, “Oh.”

“Mm. Look at me,” Cara said, not bothering to conceal her amusement at Kahlan’s sudden revelation. When Kahlan obediently turned her head over her shoulder, Cara wordlessly extended two of her gloved fingers to her. Kahlan took them deep in her mouth and closed her lips around them, laving them with her soft tongue, and Cara got them back shining and wet. She spread her other palm on Kahlan’s ass and wetted the small, tight opening between her cheeks without ceremony. “Have you had a man take you here before?” she asked.

“No,” Kahlan whispered, still looking nervously at Cara over shoulder. “Nothing. I’ve never…”

“A finger would be uncomfortable,” Cara said. “Two would be more so. A man would be painful.” She stopped there, letting Kahlan’s mind do the rest.

“Will there be…pleasure?” Kahlan asked timidly. “At all?”

Cara paused. She didn’t blame Kahlan for wanting reassurance despite her claimed desire for pain; she just wasn’t sure what to tell her. She herself had experienced the most powerful orgasm of her life this way. She, Cara, had passed out, and she swore the Sister that serviced her to secrecy on pain of death as a result. But it was possible that Kahlan wouldn’t find pleasure if she wasn’t looking for it, and maybe she did need such pure agonizing pain. Yet…without the elevation of orgasm, of true and complete release, the twin serpents of pleasure and pain that the Agiel could inflict were both limited. She grimaced. “Maybe. For some people there is, but not for others. We need to try.”

“Alright,” Kahlan said softly, looking forward.

Luckily Kahlan’s folds were still wet from her orgasm in no small way. Cara parted her outer lips, quickly driving the Agiel deep into her loosened sex. Kahlan just groaned and bowed her head, and Cara withdrew it just as quickly. She paused with her freshly slickened Agiel hovering between the cheeks of her ass. Doing this without preparing her more, without prefacing with a finger, then two, was going to make things difficult. But Kahlan had requested pain, and Cara would provide it. “You’ll have to relax yourself,” she stated, regardless. There was the matter of sheer possibility.

Kahlan whispered, “Alright,” and Cara saw the soft skin of her pucker flex as she tried to do so. She took a deep breath, for both of them, and then pushed the Agiel firmly, unsuccessfully, against the tight opening there. Kahlan cried out, jerking away at the contact, and Cara immediately sat back. “I can’t do this unless you let me,” she warned. “It’s hard, but you have to relax yourself, let me in. Every time you don’t, this is what will happen.”

She roughly shoved the Agiel back into Kahlan’s sex, simply to keep it warm and wet, and left it there while she drew her other. Raising herself on her knees, Cara rained down sudden and hard blows to her backside, and the Confessor’s hips shook as she tried to resist pulling away. She alternated between her soft cheeks, visiting her thighs as well, and finished with a hard strike to a fresh bruise on the small of her back. Kahlan grunted softly and let go of the bedpost with a hand to gather her hair to one side, and Cara knew she was offering all of her many bruises.

“Again?” Kahlan asked, once she was sure Cara had stopped.

Cara sighed, giving Kahlan some of her own spit before making a second attempt. It ended up taking three more tries, two failures where Kahlan’s body betrayed her and shrunk from the pain, two failures that Cara punished with strikes to both the reddening cheeks of her ass and her bruised back, but on the third, Kahlan pushed her ass back against Cara, and relaxed herself enough for Cara to push the tip inside of her. A tremor passed through the brunette’s entire lower body as she cried out. Cara was going to go slowly, out of necessity, but Kahlan lowered her head and pushed back again, and Cara heard a soft sound from the Confessor’s throat, a whimpering, as she pushed harder in turn. When they had the Agiel halfway into Kahlan’s ass, Cara gritted her teeth and asked her question through them. “Is there pleasure?”

“Yes,” Kahlan whispered, another tremor running through her. “So much…of both. Is it…all the way? Can you…Cara, please…deeper?”

She chalked up the relief she felt to a desire for Kahlan to experience a fraction of what she once did. And with the assurance that the pain was accompanied by its opposite and equal, Cara continued. It wasn’t lost on her that Kahlan had asked, so nicely, and the whimpers returned as she granted Kahlan’s request, pushing a little deeper before she risked pulling back. Kahlan was so tight, her ass clenching around the Agiel, that it was difficult, but after another reminder to relax herself, Kahlan helped her motions and they developed a slow push and pull together, Cara keeping one palm spread on her cheek.

“Think of the right things,” Cara said suddenly, as they drove ever further into her tightness together. Kahlan looked over her shoulder, her eyes flooded with tears.

“I am,” she replied, brokenly, and looked forward and down again as they set their rhythm. She rocked back and forth on her knees, with increasing force and frequency, sweating as she helped Cara fuck her. It wasn’t long before Cara was both in awe and aroused, once again, at the picture and reality before her, as her Agiel disappeared to its hilt inside Kahlan’s ass, and slid nearly free, and then back again. Kahlan paused with its full length inside her, tightening herself around it; she groaned as her hips trembled, and then she began again. Somehow it seemed this should be impossible, that the Agiel could do this to the Mother Confessor. That it could fill her in such a way.

Eventually the whimpers ceased as they worked, replaced by both moans of pleasure and the harsher grunts that spoke of only pain. Kahlan was possessing both; she had grown hungry, and soon it was all Cara could do to hold the Agiel firmly in place over her own lower stomach as the Confessor shoved herself back and pulled free as fast as she could, taking the Agiel inside her over and over.

Just when Cara was sure her release was imminent, Kahlan slowed, and moaned, “I can’t…not enough.” She collapsed forward, away from Cara, and stilled, pressing her forehead to the floor and sliding her hands to the base of the bedpost. Her shapely, reddened ass was very much still in the air with the Agiel held snug between her cheeks. It was both an offer and a plea for Cara to take over. She flexed her tired wrist in preparation, and when Kahlan moaned at the contact as she gripped the Agiel again, bringing it back to life, Cara remembered that she had two.

She passed a thumb through Kahlan’s folds and found them dripping with new arousal, and so she drew her second Agiel and, without warning or ceremony, drove it into her entrance. There was nothing else for it; Cara would satisfy, purge, pleasure, or kill whatever parts of Kahlan needed it. It slid home easily, deep into her wanting sex, just below its twin in her ass, and Kahlan howled, head snapping up. There was no other word for such an animalistic sound. She then pressed her cheek to the flooring. And when Cara began pumping the Agiels, nearly fucking Kahlan into the floorboards, first alternating them and then both at once, Kahlan began coming undone. Her hair, fanned out loosely around her head, fluttered with her deep pants as her body rocked with each thrust Cara gave her. She couldn’t be sure when the Confessor’s release would come in her current position, her face to the ground and a white-knuckled grip on the bedpost, but she knew it would come soon.

There were no words from her this time; there were only hissed whispers and whimpers Cara couldn’t understand above the Agiels, interrupted with rough, husky grunts as she clenched herself tight, making it harder for Cara to fuck her. She wanted so desperately for Kahlan to come, for her to reach her absolution through an impossible paroxysm of pain. And it began when Cara drove both Agiels deep, and Kahlan’s ass took it not up to the hilt, but past it, to the edge of her hand around it, and her sex took its own to the hilt itself. A violent tremor took Kahlan, but Cara stayed. The Confessor bucked back against her and cried out a lengthy wail. As Kahlan tensed, and as her orgasm possessed her, Cara could only shift away slightly and hold on. She couldn’t pull away too soon. The Confessor’s head snapped up as she curled and arched her back so tight it looked painful, and then she screamed as her body shook, the sound earsplitting and coarse, and Cara thought it would surely rip her throat as it continued on.

She’d heard the sound before: it was a cry of agony, and death, and suffering. A dirge of the damned, a wail of the hopeless.

Several heavy breaths followed, each one hitched as it shook her shoulders, and the Mother Confessor simply collapsed fully onto the floor—a little too loosely for her liking. Cara quickly but gently pulled free the Agiels and set them beside her, and then she hesitantly touched Kahlan.

There was utter silence and she felt nothing, no magic, no pain, and when she quickly and forcefully rolled Kahlan over, the Confessor’s eyes were closed. “Oh, no you don’t,” Cara muttered. She lightly slapped her cheek, and when nothing happened she lowered her ear to Kahlan’s mouth. She had no reason to believe she’d killed Kahlan, but if she had the Confessor might never forgive her.

Luckily the Breath of Life wasn’t needed; Kahlan’s own breath was hot against her ear, and it wasn’t long at all before her eyelids fluttered open. She laid still on the floor, her flushed breasts rising and falling steadily, with Cara crouching beside her, and simply stared up at her. “Cara,” she whispered. “I felt nothing but pain. It flooded me; there was so much of it. For so long there was…nothing else. Just like you said. It was perfect.”

“It worked, then,” Cara ventured. “It was enough.”

Kahlan smiled weakly. “I never imagined it was possible to feel that much pain. I was sure I had died from it. Thank you, Cara.” She raised herself up to sit against the bed, wincing, and began tenderly poking and prodding at the countless bruises on her ribs and sides.

Cara sat back on her haunches, and she stared. Kahlan had taken truly everything Cara could give her. She had gone beyond what Cara herself had experienced, and yet she was sitting in front of her as if she were merely tired from battle and checking herself for wounds. If she had no small amount of respect for her before tonight, then what in the three territories could describe what she felt now? “You would make a very good Mord-Sith,” she stated solemnly. “You could lead a temple. You could lead a…I would follow you. So would many others.”

She wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Pride had its place in a Mord-Sith’s life. False pride did not. When a Mord-Sith met someone or something greater than themselves, it was their place to accept it.

Kahlan gave her a strange look, but didn’t reply to her observation. Perhaps because she thought it was an offer. “I need a bath,” she said. “Another one.”

Cara’s lips curled in a sudden snarl. “Is my touch so revolting?” she snapped.

She gave Cara a withering glance; the same she earned after making inappropriate comments during dinner around the campfire. “Don’t be ridiculous. You made me sweat, and I was stretched out naked on the floor. I’m filthy.”

Properly chastised for her needless outburst, Cara stood and bowed her head. “Would you be willing,” she said hesitantly, “to let me…”

Kahlan blinked. “You want to…”

“Mord-Sith often bathe—”

“I am not Mord-Sith, Cara.”

“You could be,” she muttered. After assuring a worried innkeeper that no one had died, Cara arranged for a hot bath in the washroom down the hall. Then she began washing an initially reluctant Confessor of the smells of sweat and arousal. Cara was very much aware of what warm water could do for such a bruise-ridden body, and Kahlan seemed to find out in turn, gradually sinking up to her neck over the course of her lengthy bath. Once completed, Kahlan waited patiently while Cara stripped herself and quickly ducked in. She realized that her repayment, her own arousal and release, had somehow ceased to concern her; there were far more important things happening, even in silence. Not a single word had been shared since they left their room.

Cara had just dried herself off when Kahlan stepped forward with a strange expression on her face and lightly pushed her against the wall. She brought Cara to a small but intensely satisfying orgasm with gentle fingers in her sex and gentler kisses to her lips. It was clumsily done, but Cara didn’t care. Kahlan’s lack of skill was made up for by her sheer identity.

Cara doused the lamps on their return, and there was only a single shaft of bright moonlight coming through as they leaned against the open window together. They hadn’t dressed—Kahlan didn’t want to put clothes on her tender skin, and Cara had no modesty to begin with. Luckily for the Mother Confessor’s reputation their room was high enough that the few people wandering the streets of the small town at this hour would see nothing scandalous. Standing next to Kahlan, her profile looked noble, graceful, as a whisper of a breeze ruffled dark hair from her pale shoulder, and as Cara’s gaze traveled over the Mother Confessor’s body, appearing so vulnerable, so beaten and abused, so beautifully broken, all she saw was strength.

“Richard and Zedd will return in two days,” she said at length.

“I know,” Kahlan sighed. “We have to explain what they’ll see. My dress will cover most of it, but…” She touched the bruises on her brow and cheek in way of explanation.

Cara canted her head in thought. “Whatever fight we found, it does look like they favored you. Imaginary D’Haran soldiers are rarely so picky.” It didn’t take long for her to find a solution; she bent to retrieve one of Kahlan’s daggers from her boots by the wall, then presented it to her with a tap against her own cheek.

“Cut or bruise?” Kahlan asked. Cara shrugged.

Kahlan wordlessly raised the blade to Cara’s face, and Cara held still as she felt the slight burning sting of a short but firm slice on the side of her brow, followed by a warm trickle of blood down her skin. Kahlan then flipped the dagger in her palm, set her jaw, and heavily struck Cara’s upper chest with the hilt, just under her shoulderblade. Cara just grunted, and smirked.

“Harder?” Kahlan inquired.

“Hit me as hard as you want,” Cara replied. “But that will bruise, I think.”

“I’d say I don’t want to hurt you, but you would scoff and make a face at me.”

Cara looked at her sharply. That was something her Kahlan would say. The right one, the one she knew. It was good. “How are you…doing?” she asked, nearly wincing. “Do you hurt?”

It was an incredibly insulting question to both parties, but Kahlan didn’t seem to take offense. She gingerly felt her ribs under her breasts and cleared her throat nervously. “It hurts to breathe,” she confessed. “It hurts everywhere. And I’m already sore, my—where you. I think I’ll be alright.” Kahlan was blushing, hesitant to speak of the act, and Cara was relieved. This was also good. Gone was her steeled and unfamiliar nonchalance of such things, and tomorrow her inability to speak of them at all would likely return.

“I’ve never seen anyone come that hard,” Cara informed her. “You’ll be sore for the next few days, most likely. You’ll have a new secret to keep until the bruises heal.”

Kahlan grimaced. “I can’t sit in a saddle until this is over,” she sighed. “There’s no way.”

“It’s not…over, is it?”

She took Cara’s different meaning instantly, shifting her stance against the windowsill, and took a deep breath before answering. “I don’t think it ever will be,” she admitted. “This helped me, and it will keep helping me. It was hardly for nothing. But no, it’s not over. What I did, Cara…”

“Maybe if we save the world,” Cara offered. “And all the lives in it. Would that be enough?”

Kahlan smiled. “Maybe. I like to think so, sometimes.”

The matter was decided. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

“That was our plan anyway,” Kahlan reminded her quietly. “And Cara, I don’t think I’ll need anything like this again, but if I need something…someone to hold on to. Will you be there?”

Cara nodded once, lowering her eyes, as solemn an oath as she had ever made.

 


End file.
